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Concept
Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff
Summary
Heinrich Gottfried Ollendorff (also later known as Henri Godefroy Ollendorff) (1803, Rawicz near Poznań – 3 April 1865, Paris) was a German grammarian and language educator, whose "modern method" of learning foreign languages came into vogue from the 1840s.
After graduating as a doctor of philosophy at the University of Jena, Ollendorff emigrated to London, where he developed "la méthode Ollendorff" (the Ollendorff method), a new way of learning foreign languages based on oral communication rather than on textual comprehension as used in the traditional "grammar translation" method. He refined this method over the years. He became a language teacher in Paris in 1830 and published textbooks there for various languages, including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Modern Greek, Latin and other languages.
His work Méthode de l'allemand à l'usage des français (1833) was approved for public teaching in French schools by the French Minister of Education, Narcisse-Achille de Salvandy.
The popularity of his works and the fact that French copyright law did not apply in Frankfurt am Main led to pirated copies being printed in that city by the publishing house Carl Jügel (under the name of Charles Jugel at the German and Foreign Library). In 1850 Ollendorff brought a legal case against a London bookseller, Alexander Black, for importing pirated copies of one of his books purported to have been printed in Frankfurt am Main.
In 1898 Antonin Nantel's Nouveau cours de langue anglaise selon la méthode d'Ollendorff à l'usage des écoles, académies, pensionnats et colléges, an English primer based on the Ollendorff method was published by the Montreal publisher Librairie Beauchemin for use in French-speaking schools in Canada.
Ollendorff was heavily indebted to an early "modern method" teacher, Jean (John) Manesca, who appears to have written the first fully developed modern method language course in the early 1820s. That work was designed for French, and Ollendorff was keen to see it adopted for other modern and classical languages.
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